Anecdote time: Last month I had an XFS volume fail on me. It got some sort of internal inconsistency and refused to work (all fs calls returned errors until I u

Anecdote time: Last month I had an XFS volume fail on me. It got some sort of internal inconsistency and refused to work (all fs calls returned errors until I unmounted). This is where I discovered that XFS still has extremely poor recovery tools. xfs_repair will complain if there is a journal present and tell you to mount the fs to replay the journal. But mount would refuse, saying the fs was inconsistent. So the only option was to xfs_repair -L to just throw out the journal. Then, xfs_repair sucked up something like 30GB or more of RAM, so I had to make a huge swapfile so that the kernel would OOM the repair. Then, after roughly 20 to 30 hours of repair it would exit with an error. At that point it would actually mount, but hitting certain areas of the filesystem would trigger the inconsistency again and start the entire process over. In the end I couldn't fix it and sadly had to reformat. I chose ext4 when I did—I've had lots of experience with ext3 and 4 and I've never had a filesystem that I couldn't at least make consistent again (even if it loses some data).